Thursday, November 02, 2017

Surely its Time to Move On (maybe better not to panic)

Despite the hype, it is really clear to me that Adobe have done a google style deprecate with lightroom as we know it. That desktop program that most photographers rely on, but wish it was faster, multi-computer LAN compatible shared catalogue, and better still multi-user to mention a few wishes from the many that have gone unanswered for the past 4 or 5 years. I actually think the rot set in before the creative cloud subscription, which has only delivered a few feature that most other software already had, I think the writing was on the wall when version LR5 was first release. In fact I have not upgraded since version LR4.4 (mainly because I haven’t bought a new or different camera camera system, so I don’t need upgrade). I just had to buy a SSD drive to get lightroom running (more like limp along) at a reasonable pace.

Lightroom has always seemed a High Maintenance Mistress to me. She has to control everything, and often just for no sensible reason. I still can not forgive her for loosing so many of my collections (once my favourite way to organize my chaotic digital photo universe). Which is probably why I have been open to trying different and new software from third party to plug ins to alternative programs. Well there isn’t a magic answer to the best program. I doubt it will every exist. Yet with something to manage your growing collection (like Lightroom,Picasa, VnView, ACDsee, Aftershot pro, On1 Photo RAW or even Photo Mechanic) and a good collections of editing tools (too many to mention in one sentence, yet Luminar is clearly a rising star) everyone will be able to get by. Albeit with the frustration or round tripping between different packages and learning different short cut keys etc,. Such is the keen digital photographer’s lot.

It appears from my remote view outside the Adobe Creative cloud Juggernaut, that adobe is the mobile and portable tablet or lightweigh browser (cloud) applications (aka consumer new shinny toys) rather than powerful computer environments. Surely even the fan boys can see that the new Lightroom cc is pretty much a single image at a time thing that needs a lot of extra bits to make it useful for serious users. Even then it will require a fast internet with plenty of band width. At least those serious will still have Lightroom Classic CC, which is the old Lightroom you can speed up by using the jpeg thumbnails embedded in your RAW files (like Photo Mechanic and On1 RAW Photo 2018). Excise me for suggesting this sounds a lot like “buying the emperor new cloths”

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